• BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      13 days ago

      A couple engagements against Mexico and clobbered the absolute hell out of the geriatric of the Spanish Empire at the turn of the century. I would also go so far as to say European powers did essentially nothing against the Empire of Japan during WW2, but the Chinese fought a nasty decade long war against the Japanese with serious technical and military support from the US. The Pacific theater was essentially the US Naval Department (Navy and Marines) vs the Japanese Naval Department while the bulk of both Armies were preoccupied in different theaters.

      • Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca
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        13 days ago

        Mmm, have to disagree on the European powers not doing anything against Japan. While true that the island hopping campaign of MacArthur was the majority of what was going on, the British forces were heavily engaged in the China Burma India theatre which was a nasty, nasty ground war that helped keep the Nationalist Chinese in the fight by delivering supplies via the Burma road and over the “hump” by air.

  • Juice@midwest.social
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    13 days ago

    Imagine making “I’m the secretary of war of the most well funded military the world has ever known” as your whole personality. Sad, pathetic, get a hobby, get a real job

  • DicJacobus@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Trump is an old dying man, and he wants to be able to say on his death bed that he made permanent changes to the world , by his will alone.

    Changing names of organizations (DOD/DOW)

    Changing names of places (Gulf of America)

    Creation of organizations (Space Force)

    Dissolution of organizations (USAID)

    Permanent land acquisitions (Greenland, Panama Canal, Sometimes entire Nation of Canada)

    This is the exact same mentality of Putin, Putin wont be around forever, Putin wants to be immortalized in Russian folklore.

    This is just Trump’s dumb ideas of immortality. fingers of it at least

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Issue is, when he dies, the people of Seven Mountain Dominion just can continue their work, full force. Whether that will cause the collapse of the dominionist US is a question, and there’s also tge question of all the tech corpos.

      • lemonaz@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I hope the old gods and new gods eat each other alive, but they’ve been collaborating so well* up to now, unfortunately for us.

        *It’s not all been fun in the sun: the fallout between Trump and Elon, the H1B infighting, and now the Epstein stuff (arguably also popularized by Elon). So yeah, there have been some notable instances of divergence. One can only hope there will be more.

    • la508@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Don’t forget the 15 or (however many) wars he’s single-handedly ended and is therefore definitely deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize

  • Hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    12 days ago

    Calling the military “defense” has always been doublespeak. Its literally the opposite of what they do. Department of war is the correct term.

    Obviously this administration are all monsters, and they’re changing the name because they think they think it sounds intimidating. But the name change is the one good thing this administration has done, but clearly in error.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Department of war is the correct term.

      I’m reminded of when Google took the “Don’t Be Evil” motto off their homepage.

      Yeah, it was corporate bullshit. Yeah, they’ve been up to no good for a while. But when you start changing out the “We’re just here to do a good job” curtains for the “They’re red so the bloodstains are less visible” ones, it can’t help but make you a little nervous.

    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      12 days ago

      I was thinking maybe the American public will start to question why we are spending so much on war. It is an insane budget and the doublespeak of it being for defense helped selling the idea to the public. Maybe he accidentally did something will will help reign in our over spending on war…

      • lemonaz@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I hate that my Q family will believe exactly this: that he did it with the goal of waking people up.

        • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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          11 days ago

          I can see him stumble into some progressive policies…He will kill the economy and have enough of an outrage about cutting Medicaid that enough of his supporters will demand trumpcare. He can also start trump bucks, a monthly payout, so that the economy will still be stimulated. Just pitch it to him as something he can take away from US citizens, if they protest against him. He loves his name on shit, so just name the policies after him and he’ll probably think it’s a good deal.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        I was thinking maybe the American public will start to question why we are spending so much on war.

        To Keep Us Safe! To Defeat The Foreign Evil! To Bring Godlessness Back To Our Broken World!

        It is an insane budget

        I would be more comfortable with the US government taking its $1.4T national security budget and throwing it in a big burn pit than I am with our current policy. I’m less concerned with the volume of money than in what it is being spent on.

    • DNS@discuss.online
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      12 days ago

      DoD uses to be called DoW, but was changed to give a better image of the country. Reverting back to DoW under this administration, is not the good sign people think it is.

      Also, that joke Pete Hegseth can’t even do a proper pull up, let alone a chin up. Pathetic.

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    At least it is accurate. The Americans are a warlike nation founded on a genocide. Orwell wrote extensively on the power of words to change a narrative and the way we feel, it is insidious and very common in the world of politics and business in a way that it is absolutely uncommon in the world of science where only the truth matters. The oil industry convinced us that we ought to soften Global Warming to the more benign Climate Change for no other reason than it makes them look less culpable. Hilarious that trump would choose this thing to tell us the truth. Gotta start someplace I guess.

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      “Global Warming” tended to generate doubters each time winter was cold, unfortunately - the bathtub analogy helped a bit.

    • Impound4017@sh.itjust.works
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      13 days ago

      I mean, climate change is probably a more accurate description of the situation. Sure, globally on average the planet is warming alarmingly quickly, but it doesn’t always feel that way on a local scale, so a lot of people had an easy time ignoring it, but it’s almost impossible to deny, wherever you live, that our climate is changing if one is capable of remembering their childhood. Temperature extremes get more extreme each year, storms get more intense, ocean levels rise, ecosystems vanish and change, etc. All of these things are a result of warming and greenhouse gases, but unless you’ve got a hard science background, you probably wouldn’t intuitively link all of these things together, so I can see a compelling argument for a better umbrella term. All that said, though, we all kept ignoring it regardless, so what the fuck do I know.

      As for your point about America, though, I 100% agree. “The Department of Defense” has always been a euphemism, the convenient kind that lets you look pretty and get away with murder. What’s concerning to me, though, is that a Euphemism only dies for one of two reasons. Either everybody realizes what the euphemism actually means and it becomes synonymous with the phrase they were trying to avoid, or (and this is the much more common case) it becomes unneeded because they no longer need to varnish the truth; a mask off moment. And generally? The euphemism dies right before things get much, much worse.

      All I can hope, as an American, is that we come out the other side of this fucking ashamed. Ashamed of ourselves, our beliefs, our actions, and our countrymen. Maybe then we can actually build a nation worthy of calling great, but I’m not holding my breath.

      • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        Perhaps climate change is a more appropriate description for our lived experience, I’m open to a well reasoned argument. We don’t have to go far to see practical examples of the effect of greenhouse gases, with Venus at 500C average surface temperature due to CO2 atmosphere or consider xkcd’s temperature timeline with the insanely vertiginous ascent during the last two hundo years. My proposals:

        • Spicy Climate Change
        • Sport Utility Environment
        • Sweaty Ecological Catastrophe
        • Gucci Sweats Planet

        Forgot what we were talking about. Department of war. Listening to Sarah Paine on YT, clearly there have been and still are many Americans trying to do the right thing but that isn’t what grabs the headlines. The political landscape in general is getting ugly. Far right populists are emerging in Europe and these incels have been emboldened by the facist turn in America. Convenient for the billionaire class and their stooges.

        • Impound4017@sh.itjust.works
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          11 days ago

          Sorry I’m late to reply but I agree 100%. It would be reductive to say that no Americans are making or have made an effort to do the right thing - I know plenty personally who act as excellent countervailing evidence, and that’s in fucking Utah - and my primary issue with the American political climate isn’t even the rise of the far right, as you’re spot on that far right populism is on the rise globally; people are suffering under late capitalism and they want a change, any change, and we aren’t unique there. My main gripe is more at the lack of will in the American public (outside of the far right) to actually do anything about it. The 2024 election could not have been more clearly a Rubicon-type moment going into it; Republicans had already given us their entire playbook with Project 2025 and they did not mask the language there. Still, somehow, even a Republican-endorsed book that is essentially “US Authoritarian takeover for Dummies” wasn’t enough to galvanize the American people into actually showing up, so now we find ourselves here. We’ve taken “it’s the economy, stupid” and turned it into “stupidly, it’s the economy” and if we won’t even change our voting priorities for something like the continued existence of our democratic structures, that tells me that we need a fundamental cultural shift about what your civic duties are as a citizen in a democracy. Shame did the trick for Germany (sort of, that’s also kind of reductive but it serves a point), so maybe if we’re lucky we can do the same and find some semblance of a silver lining there.

          Also, Gucci Sweats Planet is a banger. Five stars. If we want a sci-fi edge we could always go with “High Octane Terraforming”. Sounds cool, covers the unprecedentedly rapid change in temperature, contains a reference to gasoline, is future proofed for our inbound nuclear winter(s), and has an apt acronym.